At the aged of fifteen, she took dance lessons at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris, which became her main interest during her teens and early twenties. She later moved on to study with the toga-clad Raymond Duncan and she briefly became a professional dancer. She gave up the dance, mainly due to lack of encouragement from her family. She then enrolled on a backbreaking course of ballet instruction with Lubov Egorova, formerly of the Maryinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, but were unsuccesful. She had several short therm relationships, and among them she found a romantic interests in Samuel Beckett, and her drawing instructor, Alexander Calder. Due to her increasingly erratic behavior, she was institutionalized for a short time after throwing a chair at her mother. She was engaged to Alex Ponisovsky in March 1932, but wedding plans were abandoned after the further decline of her mental health. She spent many years in and out of hospitals. She was treated by several doctors and analysts, one of them beeing Carl Jung, and was diagnosed at different times as neurotic, schizophrenic, and manic-depressive. In 1935, she was committed to an asylum near Paris and remained institutionalized for the rest of her life. She died at St. Andrew's Hospital.